Long Street: A Map of Post-Apartheid Cape Town

Giovanni Spissu

doi:10.3390/h4030436

Abstract

No map fully coincides with the territory it represents. If the map and territory do not coincide, what can the map capture of the territory? According to Bateson, the answer is its differences. Drawing from Gregory Bateson’s ideas, we can envision an ethnographic representation of the city through which we can represent the urban territory through the different ways its inhabitants perceive it. In this article, I describe the process that led me to build a map of post-apartheid Cape Town from Long Street. I took inspiration from Bateson’s book Naven and compared it with the District Six Museum map in Cape Town with the objective of representing post-apartheid Cape Town through its differences.

Highlights

No map fully coincides with the territory it represents
I described the construction of an ethnographic map of Long Street representing post-apartheid Cape Town through the different viewpoints and voices of its inhabitants
The primary goal of this work was to observe the city through these multiple perspectives

Summary

Introduction

No map fully coincides with the territory it represents. If the map and territory do not coincide, what can the map capture of the territory? According to Bateson, the answer is its differences. Korzybsky stated that human knowledge of the world was limited by our neuronal system and the type of language we have developed For this reason, according to the philosopher, access to reality is always filtered and mediated by different forms of abstraction (which are often taken for reality). According to this principle, it follows that no map, or other type of representation, whether artistic or scientific, could ever correspond to the object to which it refers. According to Bateson, what separates the map from the territory are their differences. Differences are the things that get onto a map” ([1], p. 465)

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